Friday, October 21, 2011

Bleg: Help Circulate the Law School Transparency Petition

In the last week of September I, or rather my research assistant on my behest, circulated the Law School Transparency Petition to the administrations of all 200 ABA law schools (with the exception of the University of Colorado), with a request that they circulate it to their faculties. The following law school administrations agreed to do so:

Albany Law School

University of Arkansas School of Law

University of Louisville School of Law

University of Mississippi School of Law

University of Montana School of Law

William Mitchell School of Law

Five law school administrations affirmatively refused to circulate it, invariably on the ground that they have an institutional policy against circulating petitions to faculty, and that such requests should be sent to individual faculty directly. We haven't heard from the other 188 schools.

I'm now asking the readers of this blog to help circulate the petition to law school faculty at these 193 schools. I suggest the following procedure: If you attended or currently attend an ABA-accredited law school other than those listed above, please volunteer to circulate the petition to the faculty of that school. You can do so either by individually emailing all the school's faculty members the letter below, or by emailing one or more selected faculty members -- ideally, people who might remember you -- and asking them to circulate the letter below to their colleagues, whether or not the selected faculty members are willing to sign the petition themselves.

In the alternative, if you're a law school faculty member and are willing to circulate the letter to your colleagues, please let me know.

Here's the letter:

***

Dear

Please circulate the petition below to your faculty. Please note that the names of signatories to this petition will not be made public until at least 100 law faculty at ABA-accredited schools have signed it.

"We, the undersigned, believe it is imperative that all law schools provide prospective law school students with information that will allow them to accurately assess their prospects for finding appropriate employment within the legal profession upon graduation from the schools they are considering attending. We therefore call upon the American Bar Association to require all schools it has accredited to release clear, accurate, and reasonably comprehensive information regarding graduate employment, by for example implementing the proposals outlined in Part III of the Law School Transparency Project's white paper "A Way Forward: Transparency at U.S. Law Schools" (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1528862.), so that prospective students may obtain adequate information regarding their likely future employment prospects."

NameInstitutional affiliation*

*Institutional affiliations are for identification purposes only, and do not imply approval on the part of the signatory’s employer.

The petition can be signed by simply sending an email indicating the sender wishes to sign it to:

lawschoolpetition@gmail.com

Sincerely,

Paul Campos

Professor of Law

University of Colorado

***

Readers who want to participate in this effort should email me via this blog, to avoid redundant efforts. (Feel free to note in comments if you're willing to do this for your own school). Next week I'll post an update regarding how many law school faculties have been contacted via this method.

8:12 That db of a blogger (you?) doesn't even let you post a comment without his approval. I tried to post something telling him to stop advertising his crap on here and it said "it will be posted after approval."

8:13 is helping in that he/she is posting the names, but I wish he/she would attempt to contact the professors as well. If all of them ignore him/her then that is news in itself (extra extra professors at 8:13's school are huge a**holes!).

One other option for doing this, while a bit more intricate, is to set up a website that you and/or another administrator updates. This website would be a four column by x rows chart listing:

(a) The school.(b) The professor.(c) Whether they have been contacted, and if so when.(d) Their response.

This can easily be done by creating an excel spreadsheet in Microsoft's Hotmail email service (click the skydrive tab). The columns of the spreadsheet would be the above items. The rows would be the professors' names. You then make this spreadsheet viewable by the public (but only editable by you and/or another administrator) so that anyone can see the progress but only a few people can edit the entries. I think Google Docs has such a feature as well.

Any time we contact a professor, we will send you an email or something stating so and you will update the spreadsheet. And you can link this chart on the front page of your blog, so every day we could check to see who has been contacted and who has not, who responded and who did not and so on.

This would also help, because if a professor has been contacted and has not responded, it will notify us of that so that we can start calling him/her repeatedly to get a response which is something we're entitled to. His or her choice of response is their right, but a response at all is our right IMHO.

This would also piss anti-petition professors off to no end, obviously, since there would be a permanent record that they did not agree to sign the petition which could lead to numerous calls to their office by people like me who want to persuade them, but if you want to take it to the next level, the option is there.

As a textualist, I would have to say that he meant to suck an actual bag that contained 2 or more dicks. Of course, that is not to be done until he posts something or comments about the comment the other person left. So, potentially, the sucking of the bag of dicks may never happen.

I think the public chart of law professors and their approval or disapproval is the way to go. Unemployed law grads go through fits of hope and anger, and when they hit the anger stage you need to give them a way to channel it properly.

A list of professors whom the graduates can call is a great way to channel this. If a business rips someone off to the tune of a few bucks they will have hell to pay from angry customers. Why should law schools get to steal a fortune and not have their phones ringing off the hook?

Concerned lawyers, law students, prospective law students, and normal, virtuous people do not have the time or money to spend lobbying. Blogging and commenting yes, lobby no. Law School and Higher Education is a multi-billion dollar industry with endless resources to fight lawsuits, grease and threaten potential whistle blowers, and create kick-back agreements with the media and lenders.

You don't fight them at their game. That's part of why OWS is so brilliant.

The effective modes of challenging them are imo:

1) Badgering them with truth. The internet helps level the titlted playing field vis a vis disseminating TRUTHFUL information to the public. One of the reasons propaganda is so effective is that it's repeated a gazillion times. This is why scamblogging continues to serve and valuable service to the public and will in the future.

2) Pricking them like mosquitoes. Every lawsuit is is like a little thorn in the side of the cartel. Just like banks, the higher ed cartel protects its business and carries out its objective like war. When you are outgunned in this war, you don't fight conventional. This is especially true when they control the laws. Instead, you keep pricking the powers that be till they open their mouths and/or do stupid things that raise the public's awareness to the issues.

Here's a good example:

Dean of TJSL in response to their former student's lawsuit:

"Kransberger said she doesn’t believe Alaburda or any other students “worth their salt” base their choice of a law school solely on the U.S. News rankings."

I personally don't view a petition for transparency as a good tactic since it is trying to work within a corrupt framework.

Most professors, even if they kind of agree with the transparency issue, are not going to sign the petition because it is chipping away at their source of riches.

It is ridiculous to think that any significant number of them would do otherwise.

IF the hoped for result is that greater transparency = less demand for a law school education = lower tuition prices, then that will obviously lead to lower professor salaries.

I personally don't agree that transparency will make enough difference to do that, but that is your hope, right LawProf? IF you are correct, and even there is only a slight chance that you are, you are not going to get many signatures.

And why would you? Each law professor probably thinks that what THEY bring to the table is worth their pro-rata share of tuition, if not more. For some of them, I suppose it is. But you know they all tell themselves they are...it's the old "I'll be in the top 10%" mindset all over again, but now it is even stronger because they likely WERE in the top 10% in law school!

You're asking people to speak out against their own economic self interest (even if you think it is better in the long term, people don't look long term when it comes to finances or almost anything else). That is why the letter will look better coming from you--because you are doing the same.

It is YOU that must convince your peers to join the club, even if we help you.

How many of your fellow professors at your school have you convinced to sign?

How many students (I ask again--sorry if I missed your response) have you talked into dropping out after a poor 1L showing?

Have you contacted the lawyers who have filed these lawsuits to see if you can help them?

Have you contacted your local members of congress?

This petition drive is going nowhere...it like a lot of hot air at this point.

We all can help, but you're the one out in front and I don't know what you're doing other than blogging, at this point.

Paul Campos, I appreciate your work on this issue. Law students should have clear information about the steep decline of employment prospects in the profession. In 1998, I was one of two persons out of 10 applicants hired as assistants in the appellate division of the public defender. In 2008, the same office posted for two more assistants, and over 400 applied.

I want to add this, though not a major focus of the scamblogger movement: legal education should be reconstructed as a two year program, consisting of a crash bar review-type course to teach core doctrine, followed by a structured series of clinics and externships, supervised by local practitioners and agencies, to teach students how to try a case, write an appeal, and do circuit court gruntwork in various practice areas. No more Nietszche specialists masquerading as law professors.

As an alumni of Washington and Lee Law, I will forward the petition to Mark Grunewald, Professor of Law and Interim Dean.

"In 1998, I was one of two persons out of 10 applicants hired as assistants in the appellate division of the public defender. In 2008, the same office posted for two more assistants, and over 400 applied."

Wouldn't that defeat the reasoning used by LawProf on why he is trying to get the student/alum to do it? Supposedly (I doubt this is true), coming from a student/alum of the professor's own school would mean something more than coming from a fellow professor.

I think many of you are letting LawProf off a little too easy. He is the one with more weight to get something done here, but now it seems like his whole "movement" has been watered down to just another scamblog.

I'm glad he stepped up, whatever his motivation, but at this point his voice is just one more that is beating the same dead horse that has been beaten for the past few years.

He's got tenure. He's got money. He'll get more respect from fellow law profs/deans than a simple student or grad will likely ever have.

There is absolutely no reason why Professor Campos can't cut and paste the list of email addresses and send out the petition from his own email account.

He has nothing to lose and he chose to be the noble law professor against the regime, so cut, paste, and send.